Apple Gets Delightfully Utilitarian With Colorful Split-Screen Set Pieces for the iPhone

Making the case for an easy switch

Apple wants you to know how easy it is to leave the dull, colorless world of your Android device and slide right into brightly hued iOS life.

A series of new 15-second ads use a simple graphic frame with a split background—the left half gray, the right half vibrant—to deliver a series of mini metaphors illustrating how facile it is to transfer music, photos and contacts from a competitor’s product to an iPhone.

One, for example, features the world’s lightest piano—a single mover can effortlessly glide it, and the pianist, across the room—because shifting your tunes from, say, your Samsung is just that simple.

A second, meanwhile, relies on a similarly cute bit of choreography. One mover lifts a young hipster woman and carries her horizontally, mannequin-style, from one side of the frame to the other, while another grunt shifts the walled photos she’s been contemplating (because your collection of selfies and food pics is surely high-art worthy of museum-style presentation).

Your friends, meanwhile, will gleefully bounce right onto your new phone, as if by trampoline, because making the jump to the iPhone isn’t just a cinch—it’s fun.

Other spots in the campaign offer clever, salty takes on non-media iPhone perks (or at least, promises). A slow-motion run through the gray terrain of your old smartphone instantly flips to a sprint when you cross the rubicon into Apple’s domain, suggesting faster better performance. A lurking voyeur can’t peer over your shoulder.

More spots will break later in the month.

UPDATE: Here are three more spots.

Overall, it’s a clear, consistent framework for a set of lively little arguments. The reliance on colored backdrops to make the case for a seamless user experience evokes the marketer’s earlier gradient dreamscapes for the Apple Watch, while also managing to feel somewhat more down to earth. An iPhone won’t necessarily turn your life into an impossibly easydream, but when it comes to making utilitarian tasks less tedious, it shines.

That’s an easy sales pitch to buy, even if competitors might still find reasonable cause to mock it—a trend that seems to work out well enough for everyone’s amusement, one way or another.